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by veridies 1928 days ago
I am a white teacher. It seems wholly innocuous to me, but I've only skimmed it.
1 comments

You aren't worried about page 6 that puts a number of innocuous points of math education philosophy and practice under the heading of "white supremacy?"

Under a literal or charitable reading, it's not a problem. It's making the point that systemic racism can pop up in a number of places on a map of the educational landscape. That's fine. It's true. It's not saying that those places themselves inherently constitute white supremacy culture.

However, this all hinges entirely on the reading being charitable or at the very least literal -- and if there's one life lesson that my interactions with others keep hammering home, it's that people are not generally literal or charitable. People are fuzzy association machines. Literal meanings can sometimes protect you in a court of law or court of academics. Charitability can protect you among friends. Absent those two narrow, tenuous exceptions, that paper gives wokescolds permission to label any of a dozen core aspects of teaching as "white supremacy culture," insofar as school administration allows it to do so, which by my estimation they absolutely will.

I sincerely hope this fear is misplaced.

I think you make a good point about how this can be read uncharitably. You're right that I read it literally: a list of specific things which sound good on paper but which can lead to disparate outcomes (with links to explain how each one can be problematic). I also understand that someone who was interested only in criticizing teachers for perceived racism could weaponize this list against them. As a teacher, I have not had that experience, nor am I afraid of it. (The only criticism levied against me by "woke" people has been by students, and the criticism was immediately rejected by my superiors.) But I understand that people are afraid of it, and I know colleagues who fear that happening to them.

I personally am unbothered because this is a document for curriculum designers with real explanations of their arguments, and I doubt that it will encourage a culture-wide opposition to, for example, "right answers." I'm not sure how someone, meaning to avoid racism, would problematically de-emphasize right answers. To my mind, the only likely negative result would be ineffectual scolding. But I'm open to being proven wrong.

(Please note that one or two examples of teachers being unjustly fired is not terrible persuasive, in the same way as one or two marijuana-related deaths is not evidence that marijuana is a society-wide epidemic.)